


stopgap prophecy

by prismatical



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst, Background Relationships, Canon-Typical Pining, Hopeful Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist Has a Bad Time, MAG 146, Manipulation, Mild Language, Multi, Season/Series 04, Self-Doubt, Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, Statement Hunger (The Magnus Archives), Suicidal Ideation, kind of bittersweet ig, like a lotta angst, sour candies cold tea and other assorted flavors, waxing philosophical abt humanity and lack thereof
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 02:28:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28681089
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/prismatical/pseuds/prismatical
Summary: “What does the Hunt taste like?” he asks. "Sorry, I didn't mean—"Daisy says, "Wind." She says, "Cold wind."___There are versions of yourself you can never go back to.
Relationships: Basira Hussain & Melanie King & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist & Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Basira Hussain/Alice "Daisy" Tonner, Georgie Barker & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Georgie Barker/Melanie King, Helen | The Distortion & Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist, Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 16
Kudos: 72





	stopgap prophecy

**Author's Note:**

> hi there, this would not leave me alone until I wrote it down so here we are.
> 
> first, some more detailed content warnings:  
> suicidal ideation and thinking, harmful mindsets and severely negative self-talk, very brief mention of racism and racial profiling (not of the characters), brief discussions of addiction, thoughts of self-dehumanization (in the most literal sense in light of canon-typical monster-hood), self-harm in the form of lip and tongue biting, discussions of eating habits/poor eating habits, panic attacks, some canon-typical gruesome imagery and just a touuuuch of body horror. 
> 
> this all honestly makes it sound way darker than it is! but all the same if you think there’s a warning I should add here, don’t hesitate to drop it in the comments. 
> 
> finally please note that I am not from the uk, so forgive any errors regarding the education system or other similar details. 
> 
> alright! here we go. please enjoy.

In his second semester at Oxford, Jonathan Sims enrolled in a class entitled _Introduction to Criminal Psychology: Criminal Treatment_. It was not because he was in any way interested in criminal psychology, or thought that he’d end up profiling serial killers like the dour-faced white men Georgie liked to watch on her reruns of American television shows, and it wasn’t just because Jon knew he was too short and off-putting to be Suave FBI Operative #3. 

Short and off-putting because these are labels he had chosen for himself, mostly because if you lead yourself with an understanding of being short it made it easier to grit his teeth every time someone brought it up as the first and apparently most interesting means of introduction. 

Off-putting, because he could never think of a better word other than _weird_ and his on-campus therapist that he went to twice and never saw again in his entire university career had told him quite frankly he should use less explicitly negative self talk. Off-putting doesn’t sound as bad as weird. 

And both sound better than _fucking nerd._

Though that one, he actually grew to love, but only when it came from Georgie.

The point is, he enrolled on a whim of curiosity and he doesn’t actually remember a lot of _Introduction to Criminal Psychology: Criminal Treatment_ , because he was so wrapped up in scheduling two on-campus therapy sessions— which took a considerable amount of effort and too many hours spent standing in a queue and filling out forms— and also realizing that he actually...liked….people. 

It was a surprise to him too, but...People were interesting. People were weird. People sometimes started a conversation by talking about how short he was, and he would grit his teeth and remind himself not to be off-putting about it until the conversation shifted enough for him to forget it had happened at all.

But the point is—the point is, he remembers one or two horrifying facts and figures from _Introduction to Criminal Psychology: Criminal Treatment,_ but the only full, unbroken sentence he can remember with any kind of clarity was from the mouth of the morose, painfully American Professor Mendez who had the habit of pausing mid-lecture to stare into the hall with a skittering gaze and a voice that would shift to something simultaneously more tired and desperately didactic than any of Jon’s other early-morning professors could muster. 

On that morning, he’d been describing a case study from somewhere in an American state Jon cannot recall—one of the middle ones, he thinks—about profiling and race biases and incarceration loops. And Professor Mendez had stopped, frozen like he’d been paused on the television, and stared into the lecture hall of students like they were a collection of riveted peers, rather than a huddle of half-sleeping first-years. Jon had paused in his own note-taking, unable to take his eyes from Mendez as the man took a deep breath. 

“If you treat a human being like a criminal, they are far more likely to become a criminal than they are if you treat them like a human being.” 

Jonathan Sims is not a short, off-putting, second semester uni student anymore. Well, he’s not a second semester uni student anymore, but those first things aren’t the point. The point is— 

The point is he’s not a human being anymore. And he hasn’t forgotten those words. But he can no longer figure where he fits into them.

If you treat a monster like a criminal—

Jon is fairly certain that there’s no sentencing precedent for creatures that steal trauma and use it to re-traumatise people via nightmare. or maybe there is, but Jon wouldn’t know, because Professor Mendez had vanished part-way through the semester and the course had been discontinued due to lack of interest anyway and now Jon thinks about it with what he knows now Professor Mendez had probably been eaten by some horrible, shambling thing bent on sucking all peace and goodwill from the planet and is now trapped in its stomach, witnessing all and paralyzed with horror. Or gone back to America, which didn’t amount to _exactly_ the same thing, but there’s overlap. 

He does not try to Know which it was.

The point is. Jon taps his desk, staring at a tape recorder he is certain had not been there three minutes ago. The point is. If you treat a monster like a criminal, but that monster _is_ a criminal— 

“Jon.” 

Daisy’s at his door, and she’s watching him. Her gaze isn’t the same as Basira’s—eyes still, but somehow giving the impression of a steady motion, like tiny mechanisms ticking and whirring just inside her skull—but Daisy’s gaze still gives the unerring impression of predation in a way Jon is certain she can’t help. 

He considers asking her what she thinks of the words swooping like vultures in a circle round his brain.

“What—“ The question dies on his tongue and he gulps down something that tastes like flecks of tinfoil, shimmering flatly all the way down his windpipe. “I hope everything’s alright.” 

He’d never notice before, just how often he asked questions. 

_What’s going on? What are you doing? How are you? What are you doing here? Is everything okay?_

Now anytime he hears his voice start to lilt up, and sometimes when he doesn’t, he’s already tasting blood and vaporized metal because _oh, that’s right, if he slips up with a power he can’t always control gifted to him by a fucking god of fear that he never wanted to serve, he risks taking away someone’s personal autonomy. Pay attention, Jon. You can’t just apologize for everything._

He highly doubts his two-time therapist would approve of the contents of his most perpetual trains of thought, but he likes to think the circumstances are somewhat extenuating. 

“ —on. _Jon_.” 

“Sorry?” 

Daisy is in front of him, snapping her fingers, and he waves her away. 

“I said—” 

“I know what you said,” she huffs. “I said everything’s fine, except you’ve been in here for hours and you look terrible. Time to take a walk.” 

Monsters who live off fear don’t take strolls through the park like weekend shoppers on promenade, but he figures Daisy is still a bit new to considering herself not-quite-human. Or perhaps it’s because she’s a different flavor of monster. Something that probably tastes less like a radio transmission welling up in his throat and more like...hm. 

“What does the Hunt taste like?” he asks, and only when Daisy looks over at him with a line between her eyebrows does he feel his lips go numb with the quiet burr of static, and he can picture his teeth staining over dark as they sink into his tongue. The taste of aluminium and copper war in his mouth. “Sorry, I didn't mean—” 

Daisy says “Wind.” She says. “Cold wind.”

“I—Oh.” 

They walk silently for a minute, Jon lifting his feet carefully to avoid the wetter patches of earth. He’s worn the wrong shoes for walking in a park damp with snowmelt, and he’s glad at least Daisy isn’t going to mock him for avoiding the mud because next to him she’s doing the exact same thing. 

“You’d think it’d be blood, wouldn’t you,” she says, shoving her hands in her pockets and squinting into the late winter sun. “But no. It’s about the running.” 

He briefly entertains asking her whether she’s heard of the theory of criminal psychology of treating humans as criminals as a self-fulfilling prophecy of criminal-hood, but very quickly cuts off the thought. He knows. And Knows. She hasn’t heard of the theory, per se. But she’s been a participant in its execution. 

He stares after another park-goer puffing away at a cigarette, a little jealous. She tosses it to the ground, and for a moment the noise of the sunlit park hisses out of tune beneath _cigarettes contain carcinogens and pesticides and are responsible for the pollution of groundwater systems that damage—_

“Jon. _Jon_.” Daisy’s looking at him. Her mouth twitches down as he blinks, and blinks again, and— “Let’s go back.” 

Jon just nods, trying not to stew over just why monsters who chase and stalk and pick their prey that has no say in being prey, get to be the ones who taste wind instead of warped and dissolving metal. 

Daisy leaves a packet of crackers on his desk that he doesn’t eat and vanishes for the rest of the day, and—as nice it is to be around someone who categorically doesn’t want him dead and doesn’t look at him like Basira looks at him, and isn’t _absent—_ he’s sort of glad. 

* * *

Elias, Jon thinks, is probably exceedingly smug about all this. 

“You’re a danger, Jon. A monster. You’re hurting innocent people.” 

The gears have stopped behind Basira’s eyes and Jon knows that only because she finally has her answer about him. No more need for calculations or uncertainty or the steady tick of assessing stares—for a moment he supposes he’s happy to at least have offered her proof one way or the other, but then, because he’s weak, because he can’t stomach the conviction in her voice, he opens his mouth and lets more words spill out and watches the gears behind Basira’s eyes whir back to life.

Jon says, “I don’t even know if it’s me doing it,” and everything just spins out from there into an investigation he only wishes were truly warranted. 

He already checks for spiders wherever he goes, and they’ve never been that good at hiding. 

Then there’s Hilltop Road and the Web’s tape, and the truth is too apparent for him to look at in the eye so he looks into Basira’s eyes instead where the gears have stopped again and she says “It is that simple, or I put you down” and Jon doesn’t think Basira would find it as funny as he does that he was thinking the exact same thing but with the caveat that he’s not sure _how_ because he’s caught himself forgetting to breathe before without a touch of discomfort and knowing what he does about Annabelle Cane he’s had vivid imaginings of blowing his head open with a pistol only for spiders to pour out from a nest of thick, pale webbing where his mind should be. 

But Basira—and Daisy and Melanie, and sort of-Martin, since he had been the one to leave the tape—have unanimously decided that he doesn’t need to die _yet,_ just stay sort of….on lockdown. 

Jon can’t say he completely agrees with their decision—the maybe-not-able-to-die thing notwithstanding, Basira is smart and could certainly figure out a way to follow through with what she promised—but being a danger and a monster and hurting innocent people is a good reason to lose his say in the matter. 

They take shifts being suspicious at him. 

They take shifts accompanying him where he needs to go outside the Institute— which isn’t many places, since he lost his flat during the coma and doesn’t need much to fill the miniature refrigerator in the kitchenette. He’s sure they take note of that too.

They take shifts delivering him paper statements— sparingly, enough that he can function, enough that he probably won’t snap and attack them all like a wild animal. Probably.

They watch. Jon reads. 

They wait. Jon doesn’t watch them back. 

They let him live. Jon waits for them to change their minds. 

They don’t. They don’t. But Melanie gives him a wide berth everytime they pass in the hall, her gaze tearing into him. The gears tick behind Basira’s eyes. Daisy gets paler, and goes for walks in the park without him. Martin...Jon hasn’t seen him. 

Jon is _so_... hollow.

* * *

Basira asks him if it's an addiction. 

He Knows at once that she had a childhood friend who had overdosed on heroin the year after they graduated together, and that she’d listened to that friend once describe the draw as _obvious, it’s just the obvious choice in the moment_ and Jon—Jon equivocates. 

“I don’t think so,” he says, after a moment where she watches, eyes motionless inside and out. “It’s— it’s not quite—I mean, maybe?” 

He looks up at her, hoping she’ll read the honesty in his face. He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know. 

“Hm.” She taps her foot. It’s a habit he used to find quite delightful, like a character from a book, before it started to mean she was considering him too closely. Tap tap, _is he lying_ tap tap, and Jon watches her settle back into uncertainty like watching a machine coming to life. “Okay.” 

With that she leaves him to a statement about the Flesh so gruesome he sits very still and presses fingers to his tender eyelids until his nausea retreats back beneath the gaping, implacable emptiness sitting inside him. 

And then because it’s the obvious choice he reaches for the next one. 

* * *

It’s probably a bad sign that the tunnels are becoming comforting. Not comforting in the way the Archives had been for a brief, warm moment before Jane and worms and screaming and scars and all those other first cracks in the tableau of “everything’s normal!” but— but comforting. 

They’re quiet. Empty. Immovable stone passages where he doesn’t have to worry about any eyes other than his own two. He Knows the others know he goes down here, but they’ve never bothered him about it. 

And yes, fine, there’s a convenient draught that makes it so cigarette smoke doesn’t linger around him when he takes a break. 

He cups his hand as he lights one he’d found in the bottom of his desk drawer— he hadn’t bought any more recently, trying to claw his way back onto the bandwagon that Jurgen fucking Lietner of all people had watched him fall off of. 

He leans, he smokes, he tries to stave off wondering if the others think he comes down here to, to— what? Is that why they don’t bother him, because they think he’s, he’s eating people or something equally horrible? 

“Now now, Archivist, don’t you know those are simply _terrible_ for your health?” 

Jon sighs, making to toss the cigarette and turn tail until he wandered into the ladder. Helen arriving was usually his cue to leave, a lot because of her being a literal eyestrain and a little because she had the tendency to reach inside his head (metaphorically, only he’s enough of a terror to do something like that for real) and tease out the very worst thoughts about what precisely he’s Becoming. 

Become. 

“Wait, don’t go!” Helen’s smart jacket flashes, even though there’s no light to speak of down here. “I just want to talk!” 

“Hello, Helen, I hope you’re well, I’m also doing well, goodbye.” 

He takes a drag, reluctant to toss it just yet. Store trips these days are accompanied by Daisy, generally, and she won’t say a word about it but he’s told her he’s trying to quit again and has the awful feeling she’ll tie up one lack of conviction with another. 

_Is it an addiction_ , Basira had asked. 

“You’re no fun anymore,” Helen says, but her tone is bright. “Here I’d thought you _like_ hearing what I had to say.” 

“Yes, I simply adore being gaslit,” Jon mutters. Louder, “Driven anyone mad lately?” 

Helen’s smile is wide, too wide, and Jon has to look away as it keeps lengthening. 

“No. You?” 

He exhales, chances a look up. She’s leaning against her doorway, neck crooked a bit unnaturally, and smirking at him. 

“No,” he says finally. 

He doesn’t say that he’d come down here because an intern from the library with a statement about the Desolation simmering inside her had been dropping off a book for Basira and mistakenly picked his office just as he was leaving. Jon had come nose to nose with her for barely a second—oblivious, freckled, barely twenty, _she’d been seventeen when the fire_ —and just managed to slam the door in her face. 

But Helen would probably laugh, and point out that he’s still shaking with the _hunger_ of it all, and that nobody would notice if he just stopped by the library one day— 

“I don’t. I don’t do that anymore.” 

“Hmmmm, that’s not what Basira seems to think,” Helen says, tapping her fingers along the doorway with a sound like metal tines being plucked. “ _I_ heard she thinks you’re going to _snap_.” 

“Where—” he takes in a choked inhale that hums like a live wire and tastes like a detonated bomb. Helen’s smile widens again. “I don’t know where you heard that.” 

“Oh, you know.” Her neck cricks a bit more to tap the door with her head. “My door opens _all_ over. I hear things.” 

“Convenient,” Jon says dryly. It’s alarmingly easy to pretend it doesn’t feel like her door had opened just beneath his feet just now, that his stomach has already fallen through without the rest of him. “That you hear something that would make me think someone’s out to get me.”

“I’ve no reason to lie about this Archivist,” she shrugs, sending sparks through Jon’s vision. “The truth is far more tragically entertaining, because the truth is, that she is. All of them are, really. You think they’re not waiting for it? Waiting and—” she snickers. “Watching?” 

He nearly turns away. But Helen...she’s made of lies in the most literal sense possible, but she also doesn’t glare at him every time he opens his mouth, and most likely finds him less off-putting than anyone else in the Archives at this point. 

Anyone else who _talks_ to him at least. Martin...Jon doesn’t know if Martin finds him off-putting because Martin won’t even set foot in the same room as him.

It—oh. 

It occurs to him that maybe that’s his answer. 

“No comment then? Or do you really not know?” 

“They’re right to,” he says wearily, and Helen rolls her eyes in a way that sends his head spinning. “It’s true, I’ve...I did hurt those people, and I’m not so naive to think I don’t have the capacity to hurt more.” 

“Ohhh, come now,” she says, tossing her head. “Don’t be so dramatic, it’s not all that bad, is it? A few _nightmares_ , it’s not like you’re _really_ hurting anyone. What’s a little bad dream to anything that the Slaughter might do?” 

For a horrible, traitorous fraction of a second, something like comfort wraps around him, because, well— 

Dreams aren’t painful, agonizing deaths. Dreams aren’t muddy hands reaching down your throat, they aren’t homicidal mannequins, they’re just— they’re just dreams, he’s not. He’s _not_ hurting— 

But then he meets her eye and they’re too much like Helen Richardson and Jess Tyrell is sobbing into a tape recorder and right, they’re not deaths or hands or mud or mannequins, because the dreams are _all of those things at once._

“Stop.” 

She smiles quizzically. 

“I don’t know what you—” 

“Stop, just.” Jon doesn’t know why his eyes suddenly feel hot, but he grits his teeth. “Stop.” 

Helen watches him for a moment with swirling, familiar eyes. She says, “I’m just trying to help.” She says, “Like you helped Helen, remember?” 

And Jon grinds the cigarette beneath his heel and immediately regrets it because of those damned carcinogens seeping into groundwater and turns to pick his way back through the dark of the passage. 

“Be careful out there, Archivist!“ Her pitched warble of a voice chases him all the way to the bottom of the ladder. “And come back soon!” 

Back in his office, he’s tucking the trapdoor key away into his desk drawer and his wrist bumps into a dusty pack of Mayfairs with cobwebs just barely clinging to its packaging. 

* * *

The point is....the point is that he doesn’t know if it’s even hunger, or just a lacking. It feels like hunger in the way that hunger feels like wanting. But it’s more than that. 

The point is it's not an idle emptiness. It’s not benign. It’s...parasitic. 

The point is, he’s spending too much time thinking about the Buried. 

Daisy and him, they try to talk about it— _process it by putting it into words_ , the way Melanie once mentioned her therapist had recommended. 

It usually goes like this: 

Daisy will speak.

“It was—it was the alone. Being alone. I think. That was the worst part.” And she’ll will snort in disgust and add, “Or the mud.”

And Jon will hum in useless agreement and place his hand strategically so Daisy will or won’t reach for it and if she does he’ll worry he’s holding too tight because he doesn’t want her to pull away because he needs something to hold on tight to. Just for a bit. A second. 

Daisy has never actually pulled away if she takes his hand, but that’s not the point. 

They point is he’ll take a deep breath because he _can_ and he won’t say something like _I think being Forever Deep Below Creation might have crushed some more important parts of my humanity in an irreparable way because I can’t stop wanting to read statements about the Buried and isn’t that just fucked up_ or anything equally off-putting because he’d only been sleeping (?) for six months. 

Daisy had been Buried for even longer. 

“The mud, certainly,” he’ll say. And he’ll exhale and say something like, “I don’t think I can ever forget how it tasted.” And Daisy will hold his hand tighter or she won’t and they’ll both sit until one of them makes a horridly morbid joke and she turns on Archers and their unsanctioned version of therapy is over. 

No, that’s not the _point_ , though the _point_ , is that Jon’s been sitting at his desk for nine minutes and fourteen fifteen sixteen seventeen seconds and there’s a statement in front of him given by Cecillie Nilsen fourteen years ago about a mudslide in Norway and there's already a tape recorder hissing at his elbow he’s nearly shaking with the strain of not reading it. 

The point is a part of him Knows that Cecillie Nilsen is currently still living in Alta and can’t taste anything but mud no matter what she eats. 

Another part of him remembers that the Buried hadn’t tasted like mud. It hadn’t tasted like dirt or loam or even trampled grass. Jon licks his lips, staring where the Coffin has stood in his office. 

It was blood, actually. 

The taste of your throat closing up. Your lungs giving way. Of mud and water scraping the inside of your esophagus until it bled and you coughed and spluttered and Choked on your own body betraying itself.

He doesn’t ask Daisy if she remembers that, because he knows, not Knows, she does.

And he is _never_ going to ask Melanie what taste the Slaughter left in her mouth. 

* * *

Basira confronts him about the food. 

“I’m not— Basira, I hardly think if getting blown up didn’t kill me, skipping a few meals I’m not even hungry for is going to cause me harm.” 

“Humans eat food, Jon.” She taps her foot. Tap, tap, _does this mean he’s less human than we thought_ , tap tap. “You can’t _just_ be living off statements.” 

“I’m actually fairly certain I can,” he says. Tone too dry. Basira’s foot taps once, and stops. 

“Well, you shouldn’t. So don’t. You’re supposed to be working on being human.” 

_Is_ that _what I’m supposed to be working on?_ Jon thinks dazedly. 

“I don’t feel— I feel _okay_ , Basira, just.” _Hollow._ Jon licks his lips. “I found a box from 1912 with statements from the Titanic survivors, it’s mostly Vast and Choke but there are definitely—”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You didn’t ask anything,” he points out. She purses her lips. Taps her foot. A gear clicks behind her eyes. 

“You look awful.” 

He sighs. 

“Thank you, Basira. But this is just...” He waves a hand distractedly. “Beholding wants more.” 

Basira scowls. 

“We are _not_ letting you go round terrorizing innocent people.”

“I was _not_ going to suggest that,” he says, standing. “I was just—I wasn’t.” 

Basira watches him for a moment. Tap, tap, _is he lying_ tap, tap. 

“Good.” The verdict. The sentence, “Eat real food, Jon.” 

He lowers himself back down to the table, uncertain why he feels so drained. 

“One more thing,” she says. “Stop talking to Helen. I don’t know what she says to you, but she can’t be trusted.” 

“I know _that_ ,” he retorts. “And Melanie talks to Helen, you haven’t told her off.” 

Basira shrugs, already half out the door. 

“Melanie isn’t about to sneak out though Helen’s magic door and traumatize people if she has an off day.” 

Fair point. 

* * *

He makes the mistake of asking Helen if the Spiral has a taste to it. 

She laughs for one migraine-inducing minute straight before advancing on him, crooking her entire body down to fit in the suddenly low ceiling. He stumbles back, the light on his phone flashing frenetically until he drops it and it goes completely dark. 

He hadn’t noticed the walls shifting around them, but he also doesn’t notice his cigarette has burned down until the embered stub is suddenly pinched between her fingers and held millimeters from his eye.

“You know,” she says, contemplating it. Jon doesn’t breathe. There’s still an orange bead buried in the paper filter, brilliant and blurred from focus. “Helen was always quite partial to sour candies.” 

“That’s,” he exhales at last. “That's nice.” 

He stays there long after she has vanished, long after the fallen stub has burned out at his feet. Heart still— _still_ —pounding, he picks it up. His phone is nowhere to be seen. 

He pockets the cigarette butt and wanders through the quiet and facts about groundwater health pour in through his ears until, an hour later, the dark is broken by the faint outline of the trapdoor. 

* * *

Melanie, Jon thinks, is strangely similar to him. In more regards than he’s comfortable with, really. He wonders if she’s ever used the words _short_ or _off-putting_ to describe herself, but then decides it’s pretty unfair of him to call _her_ off-putting when he’s the one who lived without a heartbeat for six months. 

“So...yeah,” she finishes, tossing the file on his desk from where she stands because she still keeps more than an arms’ length from him at all times, if she can help it. “If you want to look it over yourself.”

“Why—” he bites down, somehow missing his tongue and feeling the meat of his lip give way. He hisses, hand flying to his mouth not quite fast enough to catch some of the blood that wells over and spatters down across the desk. 

He raises a finger— _wait_ — to a staring Melanie, a bit resentful that the blood doesn’t drown out the taste of needling steel filling his esophagus. After a minute of the repulsive sensation of his lip welding itself back together, he clears his throat, lowering his hand. 

“Dammit. Sorry.” 

Melanie’s still staring at him, and he didn’t exactly measure, but he’s fairly certain she’s farther from his desk than a second ago. Somewhere in the room, a tape recorder clicks to life. 

“Sorry, I didn’t mean—sorry,” he starts lamely, but Melanie shakes her head, eyes flicking from his hand to his apologetic grimace to the droplets of dark blood gazing up at them from the bottom of the file she’d just handed him. “I— 

“Jesus, Jon.” She shakes her head again, lowering her hands. “That’s not—it’s fine.” 

“I just meant to say,” he says insistently, gesturing at the file. He flips it over, which is blessedly thick enough not to show the stain through to the other side. “I meant to say I trust your work, Melanie there—there’s really no reason for me to go through it if you already...have.” 

No upwards tilt, no accidental use of unnatural force to tear information from another person’s brain. An all around success.

“Oh.” Melanie is basically already at the door, though her back is still to it. He leans a bit to the left, noting it’s still brown and discolored along the bottom and not any other color. “Well. Thanks.” 

That’s when she starts to turn away, and Jon looks politely down at his desk so she won’t feel eyes on her back as she leaves but then: 

“Jon.” He looks up. She’s frowning, but she’s almost always frowning around Jon, so he can’t really take that as a sign something is any more wrong than usual. “Um. You’re….” 

He lets her trail off, decidedly _not_ about to ask. A tired part of him wonders if it's some sort of test to see if he would. 

“You’re— ergh, don’t _look_ at me like that,” she says, waving a hand to the ceiling while Jon is torn between changing whatever expression he’d apparently had on his face and not looking at her at all. “I’m not going to _scream_ at you out of the blue, I just—christ.” 

It’s still not a question, and Jon picks at the file, wondering idly what on earth a test of his blood might look like at this point. He’s still of the human...species, he supposes, so biologically it should be normal….but then, _biologically_ , his brain shouldn’t have worked without a cardiac or respiratory system to support it. 

Melanie is still sputtering by the time he’s determined that the results would likely come out as warped as any real statement recorded on a laptop, but she crosses her arms which Jon takes to mean she’s dug in to whatever point she’s trying to get across.

“You’re like... _okay,_ right?” 

That actually startles a laugh out of him, but he clears his throat at the scowl on Melanie’s face. 

“I, ah, don’t think _any_ of this is really okay, Melanie, there’s—” 

“Yes, yes, I _know,_ I’m not an _idiot,_ Jon,” Melanie snaps. “Literal evil out to get us, trapped in a creepy soul-sucking institute, your whole…” she gestures at him, “thing. But...” 

Jon can’t find it in him to be offended to be included in the list. He raises an eyebrow as she crosses her arms tighter. 

“I just—god, you’re such a prick,” she breathes, then squares her feet. “I’m _asking_ because Georgie said you haven’t been picking up your phone. I told her you were probably just not paying attention but I figure…” she gestures at him. “So?”

“Oh. I.” Lying has never been his forte. That compounds with the weird jerk his heart does that Georgie was trying to reach him at all. “Dropped it.” 

“You dropped it.” Melanie repeats. There’s a long pause. “And you didn’t...pick it back up?” 

“It was, ah, broken.”

Melanie just looks at him. 

A part of him is begging for her to take pity on him, to just call him a liar and pry the truth out of him with accusations like he could so easily do to her without them, to ask him _why were you still talking to Helen what do you do in the tunnels oh I see monster making friends with the monster—_

Melanie, Melanie doesn’t do that. And he hadn’t realized just how much he’d relied on her light-touch temper enhanced by the ghost bullet. Or maybe he’d hoped he was still off-putting enough to stick to their tradition of approximately one yelling match per interaction-longer-than-five-minutes. It’s a tacit agreement he thinks might benefit them both. 

“Jon.” Melanie heaves a long, long sigh. “You are, without a doubt, the most... _infuriatingly_ shit liar I have ever met. I’m almost embarrassed for you.” 

“Thank you, Melanie,” he says, resigned. “Now if that’s all—” 

“But,” she grits out, glaring daggers. “You also look like you've been beaten over the head with a dictionary and left for dead.”

“That doesn’t quite offset the first insult,” he asks dryly, because at this point there isn’t much Melanie can do to him but shout— and, maybe, stab him with a knife, but there’s still no proof that would kill him. “But I’ll keep them both in mind, thank you.” 

“Jesus, Jon, I’m trying to—” she huffs, throwing her hands up. “You know? I don’t know why I’m bothering. But everyday you look a bit more like something that was dragged out of a gutter and honestly it makes it _really_ hard to justify wanting to punch you in the face.” 

Jon has several questions about that statement and voices exactly none of them, just spreading his hands in a _what_ motion that makes him suddenly and ravenously curious to know if compulsions work with BSL or other signed languages or if it requires his voice— _there are approximately 300 signed languages in existence but dialectical specificity and sign language fluidity contributes to the constant development of more—_

“ —ello? Jon? Jon, you—ah!” 

He starts at her yelp, jerking upright and spilling a pencil holder across the desk. 

“ _Jesus_ Jon, what— what the hell was that!” Melanie’s jumped back even further now, one hand clenched around the doorknob. “What the hell!” 

“W—” He chokes on steel vapor spilling up his throat, waving his hands uselessly. “I don’t know— I don’t know what you mean!” 

Melanie opens her mouth, pointing faintly as her hand relaxes on the door. She’s— she’s staring at him in a way that tears, that’s making his chest shrink, heart twist, lungs stretch in all the wrong ways. He doesn’t— he didn’t mean to _do_ anything, why— 

“You—” 

Basira bursts in with a slam of the door, eyes ticking from face to face to desk to file to Jon to Melanie to Jon. 

She asks, “What’s going on.”

Jon can’t answer because Melanie is still _staring—_

“Are you hurt?” 

And this Jon _can_ answer, because Melanie is staring, not bleeding, and his chest has finally freed up space for his lungs again. 

“No, we’re—” he starts, heart still pounding in a way that doesn’t remind him a little bit of a sledgehammer being taken to what remains of his ribcage. “We’re okay, I don’t—” 

“I wasn’t talking to you.” 

Melanie shifts a look at Jon as Basira’s words crack through the now-silent office, and if he didn’t know better he’d say there was something sympathetic there. But he does know better and she turns away and Basira is standing just so that she might be able to make a quick escape with Melanie. 

“It wasn’t—Basira it’s fine, he didn’t try anything it was just—” 

Jon knows it’s rude to talk about people in front of them as if they aren’t there. 

Jon also knows he isn’t people. 

“Melanie,” Basira interrupts. “We aren’t doing secrets. What. Happened.” 

“His—it just startled me, I wasn’t actually scared,” Melanie says, and he should probably be comforted that she wasn’t too alarmed as not to sound immediately defiant about it. “His— Jon, did you…” 

“I don’t…” They’re both staring. It’s hilariously fitting how much it bothers him. “I’m sorry, I didn’t—” 

_What did I do did I hurt you what’s going on_

“Melanie.” 

“It was, um. His eyes?” She gestures at him, “Jon, you sort of...zoned out. And then I rapped on the desk, and you—they’re normal now, anyway. But for a second they were….wrong.”

“Wrong how.” 

_Wrong how_ , Jon does not ask, and he’s a bit grateful because he’s not sure he would have been able to keep the desperation from his tone. _Wrong how what do you mean_ **_tell me_ **

“Just….there was....a lot. Inside of them, there was just—” she presses a hand to her brow, her voice climbing. “I—I _hate_ this, why can’t—why is this whole place, just, just— ” 

“Take a walk,” Basira says, and Melanie doesn't wait to be told twice. 

“I didn’t mean—” Jon raises his palms, raises his apparently-now-normal eyes, to meet Basira’s ticking gaze. “I don’t even know what happened, I didn’t— I didn’t _do_ anything, not consciously—I would never _hurt_ her, or, or—” 

“Is that the truth?” 

_“Yes_ ,” he says fervently as Basira taps her foot. 

“If it’s not, if you’re playing some kind of game here—” 

“You’ll kill me.” He tries for a wry smile, but Basira’s expression does not lighten. “If you can figure out how, that is.” 

That was apparently the absolute _wrong_ thing to say, because it’s as if the temperature in the room plummets. Basira doesn’t move, she doesn’t advance, she just lets her arms fall to her sides and pins him with a look he’s only seen her use on Elias. 

“I’ll find a way,” she says. She says, “Don’t—don’t.” 

And he can’t be sure if it’s Beholding filtering into his brain or his own self-fractious mind that remembers that he had told Jurgen Leitner precisely the same thing when he left to go for a cigarette that he had carelessly tossed to let carcinogens sink into the ground outside the Institute and couldn’t think to list all of the don’ts — _don’t leave don’t vanish don’t try to set the Archives on fire don’t look at me like that—_

Pity he hadn’t thought of _don’t get beaten to death with a pipe_ but in all fairness the possibility seemed implausible at the time. 

All the same he swallows down a sudden nausea as the door swings shut. He flips over the file Melanie had left, and the blood there is still fresh enough to smear.

He stares at the ink-dark little comet streaks it’s made until the negatives sear across his vision. 

* * *

He doesn’t run into Martin where he’d expected to.

“Are you serious?” 

Jon turns on the spot, already seizing on the wonderfully incredulous voice as he nearly drops the mug he’s just pulled from the microwave. Martin, for his part, is clutching his own tea and staring in dismay at the open microwave door. 

“Martin!” Jon reaches out, pulls back, ends up doing something ridiculous with his hand involving a very uncomfortable lean against the counter. _You’re being weird_ . He grits his teeth in a grin as his wrist creaks. _Fine, off-putting_. “You—you’re here.” 

“I...am, why are you standing like that.” Martin’s squinting at him. “You didn’t...trade all the bones in your hand for a statement or something, did you?”

“No, no I—you’re—I mean, I don’t—” Either hanging out exclusively with people who he’s fairly certain are going to need to kill him someday (plus Helen) has made him even weirder— _more off-putting_ —and stolen away his admittedly few casual conversational skills or he hasn’t seen Martin in _much_ longer than he thought. He exhales shortly, standing straighter and pulling his hand from the counter with a wince. “I didn’t think you were, erh, big on coming down here, these days.”

“I shouldn’t be, that’s for sure,” Martin snorts, then hesitates. “But I, um. Hm. There’s no graceful way to go about asking about this, is there?” 

“My—” _My slow inexorable and all-too-literal descent into evil that you and I both know I would have continued at a much faster rate had one of my victims not come directly to you?_ he wants to say, sarcastic, sardonic. Casual. Calmer than he feels. He opens his mouth. “No, I suppose there isn’t.” 

Martin’s silent for a moment—he stares too, and Jon really has no idea if all the staring everyone in the Archives does is contingent to being a part of the Eye or if he’s just particularly aware of it. Martin’s stare doesn’t tick. It doesn’t spin. It doesn’t tear. It just…rests on him. Like a pause.

He supposes it would be weird— _off-putting—_ to ask how Martin would describe his stare. Moreover, he doesn’t particularly think he wants to know. 

_Wrong,_ Melanie had said. He supposes he’ll have to be satisfied with that. 

He opens his mouth, but Martin beats him to it. 

“You don’t look well, Jon.” 

The words are quiet and make him think of stone passages.

“Well,” Jon says after a heavy pause. Jon says, “I’m better than I was.” and Martin doesn’t quite frown and Jon is sure he’s about to vanish again so he turns back to his mug which has already cooled again but then— 

“Explain it to me.” 

“Expl—what? Martin, I thought you weren't even supposed to be down here,” Jon says in exasperation. He still isn’t sure of the whys and the whats but he’s _not_ about to ask, and Martin—Jon knows Martin has a good reason, even if he won’t say. “What—Peter will notice you’re gone.” 

“ _Peter_ has realized it’s literally impossible for him to go on working here without meeting the head of HR,” Martin says, and there’s definitely something gleeful in his voice. “He’s working himself up to go talk to her, which should take about, oh...four hours, give or take.” 

“Are—” a laugh works its way from his chest, short and surprising. Martin looks a little taken aback too, though after a second his mouth tugs up at the edges.

It’s possible Jon had been incorrect in his earlier assessment of why Martin was avoiding him. 

“He won’t,” Jon waves a hand, keeping his voice trained as not to lilt into a question. “Vanish her.”

“No, because I told him if he does he’ll still have to meet with whoever replaces her.” Martin’s properly smiling now, which Jon hasn’t seen since—since before the coma, maybe. It would probably be off-putting to ask. “But Jon, I’m serious. Explain it to me.” 

“Explain…” He furrows his eyebrows at Martin, a question without a question. Martin gestures, looking faintly embarrassed. 

“The statements. The...Jess Tyrell.” His voice drops a bit. Not unkind. But not yielding. “Why’d you do it, Jon.” 

_Because it was the obvious choice. Because what’s a little nightmare, compared to what any other avatar would do to her? Because if you treat a monster like a human being, they’re still a monster at the end of the day._

He mentally apologizes to Professor Mendez for butchering the phrasing structure, but there’s no “likely” in all this. Just factuality. 

But Martin’s eyes are resting on him and he wants— he _wants_ to explain. 

“Because I’m the sort of thing that does that.” 

There’s a heavy pause. 

“Mm. No, that’s not it.” Martin sips his tea. “Try again?” 

Jon frowns. 

“I—” 

“If you’re about to open your mouth and give me a long, melodramatic speech about how you’re a terrible, immoral monster, just, just save it, Jon.” Martin sets his tea down, and in that one motion he seems to become more solid—it hadn’t registered before, the touch of transparency hanging off him that suddenly evaporates all at once, fog burning off from the morning sun. “I _know_ what a monster looks like—we’ve both met Elias, haven’t we? And, and _Peter Lukas_ and—Look, Jon, you might have changed, and, and what you did was definitely wrong, but not—you’re not like _them_.”

“I’m.” Jon swallows. “I, erh.” 

Martin’s gaze rests on him, unheavy, insistent. He says nothing. The quiet is an offering. 

_I think I might Become like them._ Jon doesn’t say. _How would you know if you haven't been here_ _?_ He doesn’t ask. 

“Do you really believe that?” And he snaps his mouth shut so quickly his teeth catch up his lip and his tongue is coated with blood but it’s too late Martin’s already said:

“Yes.”

With so much conviction for a moment Jon forgets to breathe. Then,

“Martin, I’m—I didn’t mean to, don’t—” he says, speaking quickly because he could have sworn Martin’s eyes had already darted towards the door. “I swear I didn’t mean to, I just forget— ” 

“No, it’s fine—Jon, I really don’t—” Martin’s gaze pauses on each plane of his face, a very slight pressure. “Fine. Thanks for the apology.” 

There’s a long, uncertain silence. 

“Basira mentioned you’ve not been eating.” 

Jon almost sighs.

“Did she.” Second-semester university student Jonathan Sims had, more than anything, hated the idea of people talking about him behind his back. Formerly-human pawn of an all-knowing fear god Jonathan Sims can’t find it in himself to care. “Haven’t been hungry. Not like that, anyway.” 

Martin looks disapproving. 

“Jon.” 

“I— I’m not starving myself, nothing like that. I don’t think I really—really need it? Plus everything tastes...” He exhales. “Bland? Like snow on an out-of-tune television.” 

“Right.” Martin nods. “No spicy mortal terror in toast, I guess.” He pauses. "Is? Is it spicy?" He looks at Jon, something genuine on his face Jon can't name. "Do different statements have different flavors, or, or something? Like, like I can imagine what the Flesh would taste like, which, gross, but I can't imagine the Vast..."

He trails off, cheeks gaining a little color even as Jon finally tears his gaze away from him.

Jon's experience of the Vast had tasted of hydrogen, of empty breathless space as Mike Crew made his statement.

He takes too long to figure out how to say it. Martin is looking at his watch and gesturing towards the door.

“I can't, I need— well, might as well get some work done while Peter’s occupied. I should…” Martin’s eyebrows pull together. “Just—eat something, Jon? Something that’s not, you know, an account of an evil fear god meddling in human affairs?” 

Jon’s mouth is dry but he manages a wry smile. 

“I’ll try.” 

Martin opens his mouth as if to add something, then abruptly turns for the door. Something in Jon’s chest lurches suddenly, the impression that once Martin leaves he’ll never see him again. 

“Does the Lonely taste like anything?” Jon blurts, and is just about to stutter out another apology over the taste of compulsion _you can’t just apologize all the time and do the same thing over_ but Martin just looks a bit thoughtful. 

“Hm.” Martin pauses at the door, then lifts his mug to glance into it. “Bit like cold tea, if I had to say.” 

Once he’s gone Jon doesn’t bother again with the microwave. He takes his mug back to his office. He waits. He waits. He waits.

Only once the liquid stands cold as rock does he lift it slowly, and take a sip. 

The cavernous expanse beneath his skin stretches further. 

* * *

_Thump._ The knife hits the cutting board. _Thump._

“Elias wants to talk to you.” 

Melanie makes a rude sound, and Jon almost copies her. 

He shifts in his seat, nodding tiredly at Basira over the apple he’s carefully chopping into bits. No teeth inside it, so far, but he figures there’s no harm in being thorough. 

_Thump._

“I suppose he wants to gloat over...something?” 

_Thump._

“Pretty much, I’m guessing.” She pauses, frowning at the haphazardly diced bits of apple. He takes a demonstrative bite of one before taking up the knife again. “What’re you doing?” 

_Thump._

“Checking for teeth.” He offers her a piece. “Humans eat food, so I’ve been told.” 

“...right. Pass.” 

He shrugs, going back to his chopping. Melanie mutters something under her breath that he determinedly does not Know. 

He can feel Basira’s eyes on him. He places a bit of apple on his tongue that might as well be a stone. 

“So what’s our evil overlord want with him?” Melanie asks finally, jabbing a thumb at Jon. It had been surprising, when she sat at the same table as him for lunch—she’d done something similar the day before, actually staying in the same room as him when he’d been looking for a file in document storage, and the day before that had not immediately gotten up and walked out when he came into the kitchenette for tea.

It’s a bit disconcerting. 

His theory is she’s running some sort of therapist-sentenced exposure treatment to him, being around him more often even if the glares don’t let up and she usually ends up storming out anyway. 

It seems exhausting. He’s exhausted. 

He places another piece of apple on his tongue— 

“He said Jon would know.” 

—and nearly spits it out, barely managing to cough it down. 

“Wha—he— I don’t?”

“Hm. You sure about that?” 

Melanie stops chewing her own lunch. 

“I— _am_ , I don’t,” he becomes aware he’s waving the knife in distress only when Melanie yanks it from his grip, slamming it down on the table with a tight glare. “Sorry, I —Basira, I really have no clue. Other than to, to gloat or—”

“Or give you tips on how to be a better monster.” 

He bites his lip. Basira taps her foot. 

“Do you—” he exhales, rubbing his temple and taking a small bite of apple to wash out the scrape of steel wool against his tongue. “I do wonder if he could...help me? I’m not saying I would, would _trust_ him, but he’s, well, not reading statements as far as I know, and he’s still—” 

“An evil shit who gets his kicks from mucking around in other people’s minds,” Melanie says, a little pitchily. “All _he_ has to teach you is how to be _worse_.” 

Considering Jon’s doing a bang-up job of that himself, he can’t assume Elias could do any worse.

“Actually, Jon’s got a point.” Tap, tap. “How _does_ Elias feed? Assuming he’s full-on avatar. I’ve never seen him read any statements. Or take live ones.”

Jon starts to stand, watches the room tilt, thinks better of it. He gestures abstractly.

“Maybe he, he doesn’t. Maybe there’s something else I can be doing that isn’t...” 

Isn’t stale paper and dry ink and waking up with the taste of filtered steel in his mouth and the inexorable impression that he’s slowly being scraped out from the inside. He clears his throat. 

“That isn’t this.”

The prospect is more than enticing. It’s appetizing. 

“If we can figure out what feeds him, that isn’t—isn’t immoral, maybe I could make use of it somehow, feed Beholding.” 

“Yay, ethical consumption,” Melanie says sarcastically, raising her sandwich in cheers. “But you’re acting like he’d tell you anything useful.” 

“True.” Basira taps her foot. “Everything he’s told me so far has been a dead end, or a distraction. I say no. There’s no good reason he’d want to talk to you alone.”

“Wh—Alone?” 

Basira nods. 

“Was pretty adamant about it, too. Which, you know, major red flag.” 

“I...see. Hm.” Jon chews another slice of apple. It has no teeth in it, but it goes down like shredded paper and if anything, intensifies the empty scratching beneath his skin. _I...itch_ . He exhales sharply. “Well that’s—I could just relay everything he tells me back to you, you—it’s not like I’m going to keep _Elias’s_ secrets from you.” 

Basira’s eyes have gone still. 

“Not even if he promised you all the live statements you could eat.” 

Jon swallows. There’s nothing to taste. 

“No.” The hollow tunnels running beneath Jon’s skin stir, and he ignores them. He looks very hard at Basira, knows but does not Know if she believes what she’s asking. His voice crackles. “Not even then.” 

There’s a stifling pause. 

“You know what?” Melanie stands from where she’s been slowly getting twitchier and twitchier. “I think I’ve had enough monster time today! Basira, I’ll see you later. Jon, if you sell us out to Elias I’ll cut out your tongue.” 

“Even if you could,” he says, a little outraged. “If you think I’d ever sell you all out, let alone to _Elias—”_

They’re both staring at him. Melanie looks a bit sick. 

“...you’d be, erh, wrong. Am I...I feel like I’m missing something.” 

“Jon.” Nothing moves behind Basira’s eyes. “How d’you know you can’t cut out your tongue?” 

“I—Oh. Oh, no, I didn’t try to cut it out, no, good lord,” He shakes his head, a bit nauseated himself, though….intrigued. “I bit through it once, it healed too quickly to really...come off.” 

Melanie looks to Basira, back at Jon, and then turns on her heel to the door. 

Basira says, “Right” and Basira says “Moving on,” and it occurs to Jon that that was a very off-putting thing to say. 

“As for Elias,” he says, in the spirit of moving on. “I don’t...see the harm?Aside from framing me for murder again, and, and acting like a megolomaniac, there’s not much I can see him doing to me.” 

Basira taps her foot. Her eyes shift to him. Ticking away like a clock countdown to midnight. 

“As long as he can talk, he’s dangerous.” 

And he puts a piece of apple in his mouth to distract himself from the shiver that slinks up his spine. 

“You’re not wrong,” he finally says, when Basira waits for him to speak. “Depending on what he has to say. Though I suppose a statement from him could be considered...ethical consumption, as Melanie said.” 

Basira raises her eyes up, face melting into a scowl. 

“And that is _exactly_ what I’m talking about, Jon. I hate Elias as much as you, but you’re _looking_ for exceptions. Stop. No live statements means _no_ live statements.”

“I—I just meant—” Jon exhales. She’s right. She’s right. Whatever Elias has to say, he’s dramatic enough to want to adhere to a statement format and that— he’d known that. “Right.” 

“We’ll talk about this more. But I say it can be nothing good.” 

And she’s gone too and Jon pretends that eating another slice of apple does anything to alleviate the sensation that he’s becoming as porous as Jane Prentiss. 

Daisy drifts in after a minute, thin as a ghost and near as pale. She nods at the thoroughly butchered apple below him. 

“Why’d you cut it up like that?” 

Jon sighs. He holds out a slice to her, molar-free. 

“I was making sure there were no teeth in it.” 

She takes it, popping it in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. 

“Hate when that happens.” 

“Yes,” Jon exhales. “Yes, me too.” 

* * *

Here’s what happens: 

Jon wakes up in Document Storage. 

Jon wakes up in Document Storage and it feels like Vast has taken up residence beneath his skin.

Jon wakes up in Document Storage in the clothes he wore yesterday and staggers to his feet and crosses the room and opens the door and steps through and he blinks and he blinks—and something. Something happens. 

He will never be able to recall exactly what. 

But it ends with a yellow door closing behind him and a sliver of moonlight illuminating four gray walls and a cot and a figure sitting up to stare at him with eyes—with eyes that aren’t— 

“Jon,” Elias does not sound surprised. Jon doesn’t feel surprised. All of this, all of this feels like the obvious course of events. Not a choice, maybe. But obvious. And so Jon doesn’t reach for the yellow door standing behind him and Elias doesn’t shout for the guards and the two of them stare at each other until the room stops spinning.

“Elias,” he greets in a weak rasp. Not exactly the front he’d like, but he’s not certain this isn’t a dream. 

“You look, truly awful,” Elias says. There’s a hint of humor in his voice. “You really are going without, aren’t you?” 

Jon glances around at the clean little cell.

“That’s none of your business, Elias,” he says carefully, clearing his throat. “You wanted to talk?” 

“I did,” Elias agrees pleasantly. If Melanie were here, she would have tried to stab him already. Jon hadn’t thought to bring a knife. 

“Then talk,” Jon says shortly. And Elias' pleasant smile widens, twisting a bit in a way that reminds him of Helen. 

“Would you believe I was concerned for your well-being?” 

“Not even a little.” 

Elias puts a hand to his chest, false-offence written on his face. 

“You really do ascribe such malice to me, Jon.” 

Jon just stares at him, hoping his gaze is off-putting and wrong and whatever else will make it clear to Elias that Jon could tick off on his fingers all the blatantly malicious deeds Elias has committed and still not accurately convey his mistrust. 

Elias, helpfully, seems to get it.

“Fine, fine, I haven’t been...the _most_ forthcoming, but— “

Jon barks a laugh. 

“ _Forthcoming?”_

“— _but_ , I do have something important to warn you about.” 

“Something you couldn’t have warned me about in front of Basira.” 

Elias waves a careless hand. 

“The good detective wouldn’t understand, Jon. She’s not like you.” 

“What does _that_ mean?” The question slips out, but if Elias is affected by the taste of iron vapor in the air, he makes no indication. 

Elias says, “It means exactly what it means, Jon.” Elias says, “She’s not like you. No one’s like you.” Elias says, “ _You’re_ not even like you.” 

Elias says, “And it’s time for you to embrace that, or you, my dear Archivist, are going to end.” 

Well.

It’s nothing that Jon hadn’t suspected. He exhales. 

“What...what about you. You—you’re of the Eye, how do you—” he grits his teeth even as they resound with unplaceable noise. “You don’t read statements, you don’t….feed on, on dreams. But you’re not…” 

“Wasting away?” Elias raises an eyebrow and for a moment Jon’s vision goes snowy with static. His...eyes. Elias’s eyes. There’s something wrong with them. Jon does not Know what. “I did just say that no one is like you. That extends to me, Jon.” 

Jon exhales. It sounds like dead air. 

“Because I’m the Archivist.”

Elias’s teeth glint in the low light.

“Because you’re the Archivist.” 

The yellow door seems to wink in the corner of his eye. 

“So that’s what you have to say? You want me to, to _embrace_ my nature because you’re just so worried about my death?” 

Elias observes him over bridged hands. Wrong. The eyes are wrong. 

“Consume or be consumed, Jon.” The words resonate with the empty chambers locked beneath Jon’s skin. “Surely you’ve heard it before. Your choices have put you in perpetual debt to Beholding. If you don’t pay your due in the form you promised, it will...collect in another fashion.” 

“I didn’t—I didn’t _promise_ anything,” he says fiercely, certain of this, this one thing. “I don’t want a part of this, this _contract_ —”

“Yes, you do.” Elias doesn’t sound pleasant anymore. “You do, and you did, and you _are_ . Now stop acting like you don’t even _want_ to take statements. Lying to the others is one thing. Lying to yourself?” He tuts. “This...contract, as you put it. You’re bound, and there’s no going back. So you may as well—”

“Stop.” 

“Here, I’ll even help you. Down the aisle, about nineteen cells to the right—”

_—a man lays asleep who once looked into the mirror and saw only darkness every mirror he saw became its own reaching abyss until one day he smashed one and the darkness poured out and—_

**_“Stop,”_** Jon staggers back, even as noise rises up all around them like—like it had just been waiting in the corners of the room. He wheezes in a breath crowded with steel wool. Might as well make use of it. **“Tell me how to break the contract.”**

Elias stares at him for a moment. His eyes are still wrong. He begins to laugh. 

**“Tell me,”** Jon repeats, a high metallic whine wrapping around his throat and threading through the words. It hurts. It hurts. It _hurts_ but he says again, _“_ **_Tell me!”_ **

Elias just keeps laughing, and Jon is drowning in the sound on top of the throaty howling of static on top of the cavernous echo of his empty chest on top of the sudden screech of a door swinging open— 

Here’s what happens:

Jon wakes up in Document Storage. Basira is standing over him. 

“What the hell did you do.” 

* * *

He did not, in fact, take anyone’s statement in the prison. No one seems as relieved at the fact as he is. 

“What did he _say_ , Jon,” Basira asks for the umpteenth time. He’s still bent over the sink, the mirror of which is neither filled with darkness nor particularly well lit— a fact he’s grateful for, for a number of reasons.

First being that Jon is trying to wipe away what might be blood, might be ink, that had dried in streaks leaking down from his ears and he _really_ isn’t interested in moving to a brighter room to figure out which it is while Basira is watching. 

Second being. The second being he’d just barely caught sight of staring, off-color eyes and stretched skin in the glass and that brief glimpse had been enough. It had been too much. 

The paper towel scrapes his ear, and he swears he feels a bit of skin tear away. 

“Basira, he’s already said,” Daisy says. She’s leaning against the doorframe, gaunt as ever. She snorts. “‘less you want him to make a statement.” 

“It’s fine,” he says, tossing a paper towel into the trash before he can make out the color. He leans against the wall, rubbing his face. “Like I said. He went on about me being tied to Beholding and tried to get me to taking a statement from a prisoner. Nothing we didn’t know, and nothing I didn’t expect him to do.”

“You expected him to try to give you a statement,” Basira says. “And you still went, when we _discussed_ that you shouldn’t go talk to him. Jon, you have to know how that sounds.” 

“I— yes.” He admits, winding his fingers together. “But I didn’t really _mean_ to go talk to him, I just—I opened a door.” 

_I opened the_ wrong _door._

Basira’s watching him. Daisy’s watching Basira watch him. Jon’s watching his hands, one warped, knitted together. 

“He didn’t have any answers, anyway,” he exhales at last. “The Archivist is its own...entity, Elias is, is different. Apparently. And even if he were the same as I, I highly doubt he’d break contract, as it were. I don’t think he’s eager to let himself be consumed by Beholding.”

There’s a pause. Daisy is staring at the floor, now. 

It must be different for her, the hollowing out. The Hunt tastes like cold wind and sounds like racing blood and it must have much, much sharper teeth than the Eye ever could. 

“Be consumed,” Basira repeats, her tone inquiring. “You mean being hungry for statements.” 

“I— yes. Sort of. It’s— ” he waves a hand, gesturing vaguely at himself, and slightly more apprehensively at Daisy. She looks away. “Feed or be fed on. Eat or be eaten. Consume or be consumed.” His mouth quirks up. “See or be Seen.” 

“But you have been reading statements,” she points out. She does not look at Daisy, who is not looking at her. Jon settles on continuing to look at neither of them, staring at the ceiling as he nods. “Jon, what else did he say?” 

There’s a great yawning hovering just beneath his skin. A closed open wound. Empty passages. He exhales.

“No, he...nothing. Nothing. And if it’s alright, I think I’m going to go lie down.” 

Neither of them watch him go. They’re watching each other. Daisy opens her mouth just as he’s out of earshot. 

* * *

Jon drops down from the bottom of the ladder and immediately freezes. 

Voices. 

“ —asleep in Document Storage.” Basira’s even tone echoes towards him. “We should have a bit. Do— ” 

Ah. 

He _had_ been asleep in Document Storage. For approximately the length of time it took for him to orient himself to standing over Naomi Herne’s grave, and then he’d tried to recoil, and then he’d been awake. 

And in desperate need of a cigarette. 

He supposes the open trapdoor might have been a clue. Honestly, he’d barely even noticed. 

“No, it was—it was something Georgie said.”

He pauses as Melanie’s words drift towards him out of the dark. They envelop him, consume him, sitting on his skin like a swarm of mosquitos. They buzz. He is frozen. 

Something Georgie said…?

“About Jon?” That’s Daisy. 

“Yes, and it—god, honestly she should be the one to explain it, I don’t—it was—I think we need to have a talk with him.” 

“Bloody— he didn’t _do_ something did he?” Funny. That’s the most emotion he’s heard in Basira’s voice for a while now. He rests a hand on the ladder, the buzzing around him turning into pressure. 

Something Georgie said, about him. And they need to have a talk. With him. That’s. That’s fine. 

“I mean—I mean it’s not really—fine, I’ll try to explain it,” Melanie sighs, but the noise is obscured by _the coffee in her hand is precisely 76℃ handed to her by a street vendor named Douglas Byrnes who just moved into a new flat near_ and Melanie’s speaking again _,_ and, “Georgie said—” 

He’s back up the ladder faster than he thought possible. He casts around, he can’t— they’ll come into the office, they’ll know he heard, so he stumbles to the tiny room in Document Storage he once thought he was going to die in and squeezes his eyes shut and presses the heels of his palm against his brow and breathes and pictures himself shoving blankets along the unhelpfully metaphorical door behind his eyes—like Martin and the worms only these worms will drill into him deeper and hungrier because he might not be first year university student Jonathan Sims but he _cannot_ Know what Georgie said about him. 

He doesn’t— he can’t— _I do not Know_ , he thinks to himself, taking in a breath. _I do not Know_ , forcing it out. He chokes on air, but manages another, steadying himself.

 _I do not know_ in _I do not Know_ out _I do not Know_ in _I do not Know_ out _I do not know_

— until his palm slips from his brow into the hollow of his left eye and sparks burst through the darkness of his eyelid, shapes impressed upon his vision as painful and mesmerizing as staring straight into the Spiral itself. 

_I do not Know,_ he thinks raggedly. Somewhere, across the Archives, the trapdoor creaks open. _But I think I’m going to find out._

* * *

He spends the rest of the day avoiding them. It works until it doesn’t. 

This might seem ridiculous for a somewhat-all-knowing-monster who has the capacity to know where all of them are at any given time, but to be fair he can’t really leave, and the Archives aren’t that big. 

When it doesn’t—when he slips out from the stacks of one of the older filing rooms, the one that seems to suspend your breath in the air—Daisy is standing at the end of the hall, stiff against the corner. He ducks back behind some low shelving, holding his breath. 

As if that might possibly work on a Hunter. 

“Jon,” Daisy calls, muted. “C’mon, we’re going for a walk.” 

They haven’t gone on a walk together since the don’t-force-people-to-relive-their-worst-moments intervention. 

“Jon, I know you’re in there,” she says, sounding bored. Her footsteps approach, entering the room. “Won’t take long. Probably.” 

Mercury is welling up his throat, itching and _I….itch_ , Jane Prentiss had said and maybe it had made her whole to become a seething, swarming hive of Corruption, but Jon can’t _breathe_ through the static. 

His skin. His skin is too thin and Beholding’s going to burn right through it.

“I—” he presses a hand against the shelf containing a box of tapes. The room swims. “I—” 

“Jon?” Daisy is standing in the stacks a row away from him. She’s peering at him through a gap between boxes. “Jon, what’s—”

A high, pale whine pierces through his skull, an ocean of sound as big as the Vast and hungry as the Dark crashes all around him. There’s yelling, he’s sure of it, and there’s static, and there are repetitions of words he’s heard before, words he _Knows_ — 

_It’s strange to live alone. Maybe not if you’re used to it, I suppose. If you’ve lived a solitary life I’m sure it doesn’t feel so—_

_Anyone who’s written about music long enough has at least heard of Grifter’s Bone. It’s an urban legend, I guess you could call it. Not quite a ghost story—_

_Fear is a strange thing isn’t it? What you’re afraid of. For most people a corpse is at least unnerving—_

_It’ll get you too. You can stare all you want, make your notes and your inquiries, but all your beholding will come to nothing. When the time arrives, and all is darkness and butchery, you’ll wish you had stopped listening and—_

CONSUME OR BE CONSUMED

The words flash in his mind, someone shouting straight into his auditory complex _a region of the brain located in the fissure of —_ CONSUME OR BE CONSUMED CONSUME OR BECONSUMEDCONSUMEORBE—

He flees the noise before it eats him alive. 

He’s just reached the door when he spots Basira swinging around the corner. Her gun is drawn. 

“What’s going on,” she snaps, raising it. “Jon, where’s—” 

_“Jon,”_ Daisy shouts from behind him, just audible over the words and words and words. She’s holding up her hands, palms out. “Jon, just—” 

They converge on him, hands raised gun raised eyes raised and Jon— 

Jon chokes out, ** _“Stop,”_** and— 

And everything stops. 

* * *

The point is. The point is Jon can’t eat mud. He can’t drink cold tea or swallow cold wind or choke down his own blood to sustain himself. Sour candies and hydrogen won’t fill whatever cavity has opened up in the space only thinly separated from open air by a pocked and thinning sheet of skin. He’s changed too much. None of them are enough. 

Beholding wants more. 

_Mr. Spider wants more_. 

He’d picked up that awful book and tasted salt. It’s not enough. 

Beholding is going to hollow him out and rip through his flesh and suck the marrow from his bones and the quiet from his mind and turn his blood to ink and Jonathan Sims will end. 

He can't—won’t—take from anyone else. But there is no undoing. Nothing is a cure. 

He knows this. He knows this. 

* * *

“Jon.” Basira’s tone is careful. He can’t tear his eyes away from the feverish glint of metal in her hand. Melanie appeared at some point, he can't be sure when, but there's something long and sharp in her hands. “What are you doing.” 

He opens his mouth and half expects something horrible to come pouring out—metal shards, liquid radio waves. Mercury. Iodine. 

**“Don’t move,”** he says, chest wrought with screeching grey noise, he says, **“Put the weapons down.”**

For a heartbeat, they don’t. They just stare.

But then Melanie mutters “Bit contradicting,” and tosses the knife as Basira places the gun at her feet. 

Daisy is silent. Basira is silent. 

The Archives are silent but in a stifling sort of way a Too-Close-I-Cannot-Breathe sort of way a there’s-no-way-out-there’s-not-even-an-up-oh-god-what-have-I-done sort of way— 

“Jon,” Daisy finally says. She sounds tired. “Talk to us.” 

He—he tries to shove the laughter back into the space in his chest but doesn’t quite manage it and even as the static swells he thinks he hears a muttered _Christ_ , a quiet _fuck_ but it’s just— it’s just— 

“You want me to make a _Statement?_ ” he finally wheezes, over the screaming chorus of the tape recorders. “I— I—” 

_“No_ , Jon, we just want—” Basira starts but he cuts her off. He’s louder. He’s louder and it _hurts_.

“Statement,” he says, and he strangles a sob and he says, “of the entity formerly known as Jonathan Sims, regarding the taste of metal, statement begins—” 

“Jon, just— just _stop_ this, it’s—” 

“I can’t!” he laughs, flat and sharp and it still hurts as the static crescendos all around. “I can’t stop turning into this. I can’t stop and I can’t turn back and I can’t stay still and I don’t _really_ want to die, but I can’t—I, I, I don’t want to _be_ this!” 

One of them might have said something in response. One of them might have broken his compulsion and taken a staggering lurch forward. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. 

He blinks and he’s in his office and he blinks and he’s descending the ladder and he blinks and he blinks and then it’s quiet. It’s quiet. It’s quiet. 

* * *

It’s quiet. Then a creak of a hinge. Something glints from nowhere. 

“So,” Helen warbles, smile twirling at the edges of her face as she steps into existence. “Snapped! How’s it feel?” 

**“Stay away,”** he orders, but something must go wrong because the words ricochet right back at him, and then he’s flat on his back and Helen is looking down on him. 

“You don’t want to do that, Archivist,” she smiles, eyes spinning. Spinning, he’s—he tears his gaze away, dragging himself to his feet. “Friends don’t compel friends.” 

“We’re not _friends!”_ he snaps, voice bristled with static. “Stop trying to—to _twist_ me into _you.”_

Helen laughs at that, and the walls ring with mistuned churchbells. 

“Oh, I think you’re well past _that_ ,” she says easily. “I don’t know what you think you look like right now, but _I_ wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark tunnel.” 

“Go away,” he hisses, dragging a hand down his face and trying to get past her. “I just want—I don’t know, I don’t—” 

“Archivist.” Helen Richardson’s voice had shook in the moments he’d known her. Helen the Distortion’s voice just sort of...meanders. “Think about why you’re down here, of all places. You _finally_ stand up for yourself, and when the others turn on you, you come to _me._ ” She hums, watching “Don’t you think that makes us friends?” 

“I—it’s quiet down here,” he defends. “And I didn’t _stand up_ for myself, I’m not deluded enough to think—I, I just— “

“Yes?” Helen smiles. Knowing.  
  
“I didn’t want to die. Not.” He exhales. It sounds like a tape rewinding. “Not yet.” 

“And you’re hoping you can lose them down here quickly enough to make it back to your little trapdoor?” Helen looks at him pityingly. “Bad luck, sweetheart. I peeked and saw Melanie waiting up top. Sharp one, she is. Love that about her! I admit I’ll be a bit sad if you decide to break her brain— “ 

“Shut up,” he grits out, ducking past her. Another door appears immediately in front of him again, and he “I, I— I need—” 

_“Jon!”_ A voice shouts. _“Jon, get back here, we’re not—”_

He staggers further into the dark. 

* * *

It’s quiet. It’s quiet. He takes a breath. A door opens. 

“Face it, dear, you’ve run out of time picking sides.” Helen reaches out as if to prod him, a pin-sharp nail inches from his arm. “You can either kill them to escape, or they kill you. It’s simple math, and I _hate_ math. Except for Fibonacci, the man was onto something.” 

“Those are _not_ the options here,” Jon snaps, still catching his breath.

“You’re trapped, Jonathan. You need.” Helen smiles. Her face flickers. “A door.” 

“I don’t,” Jon pants, Michael’s voice blurring into Helen’s. “ _Need_ anything from you.” 

“Come _on_ Archivist, you know I couldn’t hurt you if I tried.”

“Do—do I— I don’t know that.” 

She shrugs, and he shuts his eyes at the sight. 

“You’re too far gone for that, Archivist. Too powerful for a little old Distortion like me to take a bite out of.“

“That, that sounds exactly like what you’d say if you wanted, to kill me in there,” he pants. “You aren’t—” 

“Jon?” a voice echoes, far too close. There’s a flash of light somewhere, a torchbeam across a different corner. He falls silent. “Jon, it’s Basira.”

“Better answer her,” Helen says in a stage-whisper. “She’s got a gun!” 

_“Helen.”_ Basira snaps, and the light swings wildly. “Where are you? Where’s Jon? _”_

Helen holds a finger to her lips, winks at Jon, and pointedly creaks the yellow door shut. 

Basira curses, and the torchlight recedes, but doesn’t say a word til he hears the soft scuff of retreating footsteps. He glares at Helen. 

“What?” she pouts. “Just trying to help you. As _always_. You really don’t appreciate me, you know that?” 

“I don’t _appreciate_ being _manipulated_ ,” he grounds out, hugging his arms around himself and pressing against the wall. 

“Manipulated? That’s not me.” Helen folds herself across from him, leaning against her door in a way that makes his eyes hurt from the angles alone. “Your thing with spiders is a little, what’s the word? Projecting.” 

“I’m not—can you for once, just _go away?”_ he snaps. “W,what could you _possibly_ want from me right now?“

“Oh, I’m just an audience member,” she waves a perilously sharp hand through the air. “And like it or not, Archivist _you_ are quite the weird little spectacle.” 

“Really,” he mutters, pressing a palm to his eyes. “So glad you’re entertained.” 

“I am! And you are. Capable to get what you want, but all tangled up in your own little worries.“ She laughs in circles. “Like a fly in a web, if you don’t mind the metaphor.” 

He does, quite a lot, but says nothing. He’s staring at a scrape on his hand. 

“Too thin,” he says faintly, pressing a thumb against the scrape. It hadn’t even drawn blood, just torn at the skin. “It’s...it’s not enough.” 

“Poor thing.” Helen’s voice has gone weirdly quiet. Helen doesn’t do quiet, she’s always the thing that shatters the tunnels into something unbearable. “You’re going to end if you keep this up, Jonathan.” 

“I...know.” That’s the point. But that’s not the point. “Elias told me.” 

“You know,” Helen draws out after a pause where there are maybe footsteps that make Jon’s chest seize. “I’ve taken you to him before. I could do it again.” 

“I didn’t ask you to.” His throat is still numb with the backwash of noise. He presses the hand back against the wall. “I opened the wrong door.” 

“Ohhh, I don’t know about that.” The wall beneath his hand goes smooth and Jon blinks and blinks and there’s light coming from somewhere and his hand is resting against a yellow door. 

“Hel, Helen?” Jon draws back. He turns, but she’s gone. The door remains where it is, faintly illuminated as if a spotlight were on it. 

“You can’t honestly tell me you wouldn’t want to rip a story out of his brain,” Helen’s voice says out of the dark. “Didn’t he kill Gertrude?” 

“You know the answer to that.” Because Michael knew the answer to that. But Jon’s tone is automatic, he can hear it bouncing back to him in the dark. Flat. Focused. 

Something is stirring in the empty space beneath his skin. His eyes are glued to the door. 

“Fine, fine. Not Elias then.” Helen hums to herself, the noise circular. “What about that awful Hunter fellow? The one you met in America?”

“How, erm,” he says distractedly. He can’t place the shade of the wood. One moment it’s piercing, gold, the next it’s a dull flaxen wood. He blinks. He blinks. He was speaking, he was asking— “How do you know about him.” 

“You told me, remember?” Helen’s voice seems to double, become chorded. “You can See where he is, and I’d take you there, and once you have his story we’ll see if he feels like opening a door. There really is a mutual benefit to all this.” 

What she’s saying is wrong, somehow, but that’s not the point. The point is. The point is. 

He presses his hand to the door. Something sweet and acid settles over his tongue. 

The point is he doesn’t have to be hollow. Scraped clean from the inside out. 

Consumed. 

The point is that the only thing between him and not ending, is a door. 

“You don’t even have to knock,” a cheery voice says. The sound is muffled. “Come right in.” 

“I,” he exhales displaced air. The door is swimming before his eyes. “I don’t want to hurt him, I just. I.”

“You ask,” the voice responds, “He answers, and you get to live. Just open the door, Archivist.” 

Jon presses his eyes closed. 

“I don’t want to die,” he murmurs. The wood warps beneath his fingers. 

“Open the door, then,” something says. Something says, “Open the door, and you’ll survive, Archivist!” 

Jon opens his eyes. 

“Yes,” he says quietly, at last. “Yes, it would.” He exhales.

He says, “But Jonathan Sims wouldn’t, would he.”

The emptiness twitches beneath his threadbare skin. Protest, maybe. 

“I don’t—” 

Jon’s hand falls away from the door and iron rushes into fill the sweetsour taste in his mouth, and there’s a great discordant sigh as everything around him twists back into place. 

“Jon!” There’s a beam shining in his face and he throws his hand up to block the light, the echoes of the cave sudden and deafening. “Shit, he’s—shit. Daisy, hold the torch.” 

“Please,” he says hoarsely, dizzy with the sudden light. He says, “I’m not—I’m still—” 

“Jon, it’s—it’s okay.” Basira steps forward, palms out, eyes still. He can’t spot a gun. “Helen had us going in circles or something, we couldn’t find you.” 

“I, I don’t—I think she’s gone, the door is—” He doesn’t have to look to know the door is gone just like he doesn’t have to listen closely to know scraps of his own power are still hanging in the air, clinging and tangible as cobwebs. He inhales, trying to drag the sound in, all that empty space must be good for _something_ until the pressure in the air somehow eases. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” 

“Stop,” Basira says, tone unreadable. “Stop talking Jon, this is—this isn’t a good situation, but I—just come with us back upstairs. Helen’s not going to leave us alone for long.”

“I—I don’t—” 

“Jon, just—"

“Basira,” Daisy interrupts. “I think—quiet. Give him a moment.” 

Basira’s eyes move at that, but she nods, and the tunnels stretch out around them in a diagram of perfect quiet. He exhales. He exhales. 

“You okay now?” Basira asks, after several minutes. “You look a bit…” 

_I don’t know what you think you look like right now, but I wouldn’t want to meet you in a dark tunnel._

“Peaky,” Daisy supplies, and Jon chokes out a laugh. 

“We can go upstairs. I don’t trust Helen not to pull that again.” Basira’s turning away, gesturing and Jon is fairly certain he hadn’t imagined the panic and the running and the compulsion and he exhales. He exhales. 

“I think,” he manages, once he’s mastered his breathing a bit more. “If you’ve figured out a way to kill me. I’d rather you do it down here, if that's alright.” 

The two women exchange a look. 

“Don’t be so dramatic, Jon,” Daisy groans, at the same time Basira says “We’re not going to kill you, Jon.” 

And Jon. 

Jon inhales. 

“Even after, after I— ”

“We could hear you.” Basira turns away, stride purposeful. Daisy lets the torch linger on him, as he, inexorably, starts as if to follow. “You didn’t open the door.” 

“You—” 

“C’mon, Jon.” Daisy watches him. “Let’s get out of here.” 

* * *

Once he’s showered in the cramped excuse of the Institute changing room, managed to eat a half of a sandwich that Melanie dumped in front of him with a not-so-playful threat to eat or risk offending her, read a rather unsettling account of the Stranger involving an apparently cursed doll — not until these oddly domestic traditions are passed, in and out of the space of Daisy and Basira and Melanie as they appear and say nothing and disappear — not until then does he sleep. Jordan Kennedy’s nightmare is vivid as ever. 

Jon wakes up in Document Storage. 

Jon wakes up in Document Storage and exhales. Winds his hands together. The skin is too thin. There’s a dull whine of static buried in his chest. 

He exhales again and it hushes away into nothing. 

The door creaks open, and Jon dares to look up and it’s Daisy, leaning into the doorframe. 

“Hi,” she says. “You’re up.” 

“Yes, um,” he nods, untangling his fingers. “You...I’m…” 

He doesn’t really know what he planned to stay. 

“Feel like a person again?” she quips.

“Very much so,” he sighs gratefully. “I—Daisy I _am_ sorry, I didn’t mean to, well, be quite so…” _off-putting_ sits at the edge of his tongue out of habit, but the word feels _extremely_ tame for describing a monstrosity-fueled freakout. “I know the tunnels…” 

“It felt like a Hunt.” Her throat bobs like she’s swallowing back the helm wind. “But I didn’t. It didn’t take me.” 

“Good,” he says. He nods. “Good.” 

“Shut up,” she says, though there’s no heat in it. “C’mon. We’ve got things to talk about.” 

And she leads him to the main office and the pale grey door swings shut behind them. 

* * *

Georgie’s presence is what throws him off. She’s sitting with one leg crossed beneath the other, just next to against Melanie’s desk. 

No matter how much Melanie might want him dead, she wouldn’t do it in front of Georgie. He’s pretty sure. Ninety-six percent. 

“Jon! You look dreadful,” she says brightly, though there’s a line between her eyebrows he wishes he wasn’t as familiar with as he is. Melanie snorts. 

“That’s...thank you, ah, sorry, you are….” Jon gestures a little helplessly. “Here?” 

“I am,” Georgie agrees. “Heard some things. Thought you all might need reinforcements.” 

Ninety-five percent now, but he sits all the same. Daisy nods at him, before gesturing at Melanie. Basira’s conspicuously absent, but he hears clatterings from the kitchenette that Melanie and Daisy slouch off towards. 

“Reinforcements,” he prompts once they’re alone, apprehensive. “At the hospital, you said...nothing untrue, really, I—it _was_ a, a weird, um, awakening.” 

“It was,” she nods. “But it’s been a bit, and I’ve had some time to think, and I heard some things from Melanie about what you’ve been up to since.”

He directs his eyes to the ceiling, stopping just short of scratching his neck for fear of tearing the skin.

“That’s right, look guilty,” Georgie says, poking him. “A _coffin_? Really Jon?” 

“It was the only way to—” he starts to protest, but she waves it off. 

“To get Daisy out, I know. And that’s actually something that made me think.”

Georgie doesn’t stare. Not really. She glances and studies and tilts her gaze, but she doesn’t outright stare and it’s...it’s nice. Different and refreshing, and Jon isn’t sure why so, but perhaps he really should look into meeting more people who aren’t tied in some way to the eldritch incarnation of watching. 

“First, let me explain. It wasn’t healthy for me to watch you throw yourself headfirst into things you _knew_ were going to end badly, just to find out if they would.” 

She holds up a finger as he opens his mouth, hollow chest twisting. 

“Don’t apologize, I know what I’m saying, and I stand by that. _But_.” She tips her head. “From what I hear’s been going on, I kind of started to think you were never really given many options. And now, I think I’ve been sort of a bad friend.” 

“Bad frie—you let me stay at your flat while I was wanted,” he says, half-incredulous. “For _murder!”_

“To be fair!” She waves a finger. “I didn’t know it at the time. Not sure what I woulda done if you’d told the truth, but,” she pops her shoulders up in a shrug. “Doesn’t matter now. We’re here, and you need help, and I don’t think it’s because you decided you wanted to be here.” 

“...right.” Jon turns the words over, trying and failing to fit it into a number of wonderings swirling round his head. “And so you’re here now….to…”

Georgie smiles, tapping her fingers against the desk. 

“Do you remember that one class we both took our first year? With the American professor who had to leave halfway through the semester because his wife had a baby?” 

“I—“ Jon’s brain stalls, while words he doesn’t recognize filters into it unbidden _the baby’s name was Henrietta she weighed 6 lbs 9 oz and was delivered by Dr. Ste—_ “Are you talking about _Introduction to Criminal Psychology: Criminal Treatment?_ With Professor Mendez?” 

Georgie laughs lightly. 

“Only you would remember the full course title. And yes, that’s the one. I’d forgotten his name.”

“I— I’d forgotten you took that class,” is all he can say, because _Julian Mendez is 56 years old yesterday he walked into an animal shelter in Witney and walked out with an underweight two-year-old mutt because his daughter Henrietta has been having a hard time at school lately—_

“Jon. _Jon.”_

“ — worry, he does this,” Daisy says, and he’s not sure when arrived or when her hand landed on his shoulder, but somehow the weight of the hand lets his brain become aware of Georgie peering at him. “Don’t worry about the eyes either. He’s just dramatic.” 

His hands are suddenly cupping warm ceramic, and Basira nods, settling down in a chair across from him with her own mug as Daisy leans on the desk. 

He’s a little grateful Melanie’s keeping her distance. He’s not sure he could bear wherever this conversation is going, with her up-down presence. Plus, they have a tradition to keep to, and he isn’t really in the mood for a shouting match.

He doesn’t let himself glance at the desk that used to be Martin’s.

“I’m not—” he shakes his head, as if that will clear it. “Sorry, I—just—sorry, I didn’t know he, he—” _didn’t get sucked into the vortex of nightmares and horror that’s followed Jon around for what it feels like his entire life, how lovely for him._ “That’s good, good for him.” 

“Yeah, ‘spose it is.” Georgie nods, eyes not unkind. “Good teacher. And yes, I was in it, it was before I took a year off, before we knew each other. Well, do you remember, his whole thesis about, alienation and criminalization? He had that whole _thing_ about social prophecy, surely you remember.” 

The words are already ready at his lips, spilling over like they’ve been waiting to be invited into the air. 

“If you treat a human being like a criminal— “

“No, no,” Georgie cuts him off, waving her hand. “Well—I s’pose it could still apply if we wanted to get more metaphorical about it, but—Jon, I was talking about the other bit.” 

“Other bit? There was no other bit.” Jon frowns. “Wh—there was no other bit.” 

Georgie rolls her eyes. 

“If a human being is constantly and consistently treated like something they are not, they are extremely likely to start believing it, and subsequently behaving accordingly,” she recites, then prods his arm. “It was—well it was a bit more nuanced, I’m sure, but you get the idea. Can you think of any way that might apply here?” 

“I—erh—I’m not a human being, though?” He coughs a laugh. “I appreciate the sentiment, but that’s, that’s pretty categorically fact at this point. You were there in the hospital, that’s— human beings don’t _do_ that, I, I—” 

“Jon, please. I know we’re to the point of being a bit more literal, but I was hoping you’d be smart enough to get my point.” 

Daisy snorts. 

He stares at them dumbly, feeling strangely like he’s being scolded. She looks at him expectantly for a second more before Basira, of all people, comes to the rescue. 

“The point is,” Basira says matter-of-factly, “We haven’t been able to afford doubt since the Unknowing. Doubt’s dangerous. Uncertainty would have gotten us killed. And no offense Jon, but you are one big uncertainty.” 

“Basira, I’m certainly not going to begrudge you practicality,” Jon says. This is a bit more comfortable territory, and Basira’s suspicion is something he really rather values. “And I don’t see what this has to do with what Georgie—” 

“Oh, just listen,” Georgie says, knocking her knee against his. “She’s making a statement, isn’t that your whole thing?” 

He protests for a moment before realizing the three of them are smiling. He exhales. 

“Yes, I suppose it is. But I’m _not_ recording it.” 

Basira huffs what could be a laugh. 

“Good. The point is,” she says. “You didn’t do a great job explaining the whole...thing.” She looks over at Daisy, eyes quite still. Daisy looks back with an unreadable expression. “But I didn’t do a great job understanding it.”

Jon lets the silence between them string on, catching Georgie’s eye as Basira and Daisy carry on some sort of silent conversation. After a few seconds, Basira clears her throat.

“Point is, I was using the wrong metaphors. It’s not an addiction, I get that now. And we’ve been calling it hunger, but I don’t think that’s quite right.” Basira meets his gaze, likely anticipating the question pressing at his lips. “Now I’m thinking a parasite. Like you said.With the Eye it’s consume or be consumed, and right now even with the paper statements, that thing’s eating you alive.” 

He looks down at his arms, his dark skin normal at first glance, if a little ashy, but like paper-mache to the touch. He’s managed not to tear it open since the tunnels, but he doesn't want to think about what might come pouring out. 

“I, I appreciate the benefit of the doubt. But...I _am_ the Archivist,” he says quietly. “I don’t know if it’s so easily distinguished anymore as, as something only feeding on me. You’ve seen what I can do, Basira, I’m still— ” 

“Bloody hell Jon, that’s still not the point,” Daisy interjects, rolling her eyes. “Stop being all broody and listen.”

“I am _not—_ ”

“Oh, you definitely are,” Georgie says airily. 

“I—” 

“Look,” Basira taps her foot, a line appearing between her brows. “I still don’t like uncertainty. You can’t lie to us about hunting, and you can’t lie to us about how bad it’s getting.”

 _It’s bad. It’s bad, and_ _when you know how bad you are going to understand just how far gone how much I want—_

“But I’m not going to pretend I haven’t been looking at you and seeing what isn’t there yet.” Tap, tap. “And frankly I don’t think it’s been helping you avoid seeing the same.” 

“Self-fulfilling prophecies,” Georgie adds helpfully. “They’re a hell of a thing.” 

“I—yet,” Jon says, a little insistently. “What isn’t there _yet_ , but you can’t deny whatever, whatever I am or am Becoming, is—I almost opened that door. You heard how close it was.” 

“But you didn’t.” Basira’s tone brooks no argument. “And honest? I kind of thought you would. But you didn’t.” 

“I wanted to.” He catches Georgie’s eye, and looks away. “I— I wanted to.” 

Helen is still down there, he knows. The question has still been asked. The door isn’t open yet, but once it is— 

“Actually,” Georgie puts in, interrupting his train of though. “From what I heard, you just didn’t want to die.” 

He opens his mouth and shuts it. Georgie angles a look at him, something smug there. 

“Right. And plus, that’s _still_ not the point, Jon,” Basira says, sounding exasperated. “The point is you didn’t. You’re not gone yet. And I think acting like you are has been.. Hm. I’ll call it a tactical error." 

Jon blinks. Jon blinks and— 

“I...appreciate the vote of confidence. But pretending I’m not—” _Not being burned through like a cheap candle, not scaldingly hollow with a mind full of noise and refuse and tinfoil hunger._ “Not what I am, it’s not going to, to _cure_ me. Even if this, this social prophesy idea has an impact, the statements are still—I still _want_ them, they’re still...It’s not a cure.” 

“It’s not a cure,” she agrees. Tap, tap. “Nothing is a cure. It’s a stopgap. And it’s better than accidentally convincing you you’re already our enemy.” 

Jon...Jon stares at her. Blinks. Blinks. She levels her gaze back, eyes unmoving. 

“We know there’s not a cure,” Daisy says flatly. “But we’re not gone yet, Sims.” 

She says it with more conviction than he’s heard from her since before the coffin— her expression is hard, but still the _yet_ scratches at his mind. 

“And if...when I do reach a point when I...” he makes an abstract motion. “Open the door, so to speak?” 

Basira looks at him for a long moment before sliding her eyes over Daisy and back. Georgie is silent, not staring, but not looking away either.

And Basira says, “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.” The gears behind her eyes click to a stop, a certainty there. “But you didn’t ask for this. None of us did.” 

“We all have expiration dates.” Daisy nods, nods with that same shaking-but-unyielding conviction as before. “No sense in hurrying them along for each other.” She huffs, softly. Basira is watching her with a quiet, unmeasured gaze. “Don’t see a lot of humanity in that.” 

And Jon half-remembers a somber tone, speaking something about doom, something about inevitability. Something about choice. The soft taste of aged poplarwood, unwearied and indifferent, sitting on his tongue. 

* * *

“So it’s a...damned if you do, damned if you don’t sort of deal, right?” Martin offers.

They’re on the Institute roof. After much discussion, it had been decided that taking smoke breaks in a creepy tunnel wherein sporadically resides a creature intent on making him question himself and his resolve was...poor decision-making at work. 

The roof is a compromise. It isn’t as quiet. It’s not as peaceful. It’s not even beautiful, the only accessible areas looking out over an empty lot. But the air is fresh and Martin had somehow gotten away long enough to sneak him the key and then had insisted he had to be the one to show him up— _I basically run the Institute, I should probably make sure Elias wasn’t keeping something horrible up here—_

“Yes, that’s…” Jon starts, fiddling with his lighter. The ridged sparkwheel cuts through his thumb, the paper-thin skin tearing and healing instantaneously. He scowls at it. “Very much so.”

“Stuck between a rock and a hard place, only the rock is traumatizing innocent people and the hard place is being eaten alive by an eldritch being of terror.” 

“That—pretty much. Yes.” 

That’s probably the clearest it’s ever been phrased, even by him. 

“Well.” Martin seems to come into focus. Jon tries not to study him. “What’s the next step, then?” 

“Mm. Team bonding, apparently. Melanie wants to take me to a pub trivia night, see if Beholding can be useful for once. Though I highly doubt Basira would go for that. We agree that crowds might not be...the best choice for me.” 

“Jon,” Martin says, voice dead serious. “I would literally kill to see you play at pub trivia.” 

“You are—if we go, that is, you are, um, invited,” Jon says with a weak laugh, but Martin’s expression retreats, and Jon sighs. “Right.” 

“I—it’s just—” 

“Yes, yes, I—I understand, Martin.” He looks at him for a moment longer. So much for not studying him. “Whatever your plan, I do...trust that it’s important.” 

“That’s—that’s good. Good.” Martin gaze rests against his. “Take—take care of yourself, Jon. Please.” 

Martin’s gone between one blink and the next. Jon...exhales. Nothing is a cure. 

Jon stays long enough that the cigarette burns down and the stub cools in his hand, the paper dusky and stale. He pockets it, staring over the vacant lot. It’s not the same, but—but it’s quiet. It’s quiet. It’s quiet. 

**Author's Note:**

> and that's all, folks! 
> 
> thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed it. comments are absolutely treasured, they truly mean the world to me, and if you'd like to chat I exist on tumblr at [ prismatic-et-al ](https://prismatic-et-al.tumblr.com). drop me a line! 
> 
> thanks again, and take care


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